


West

by eudaimon



Series: Our Lives Apart [24]
Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-12
Updated: 2012-07-12
Packaged: 2017-11-09 20:38:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/458133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Where we always wanted to go and what we always wanted to believe was true.</p>
    </blockquote>





	West

**Author's Note:**

> Where we always wanted to go and what we always wanted to believe was true.

"America is a myth," she says and rolls towards me and all I want her to do is kiss me, but she purses her lips thoughtfully instead. I reach out and brush the blunt ends of her black hair back from her face and then I take matters into my own hands and kiss her. Her mouth tastes of cigarettes and too much sugar. We eat too much sugar these days. We hardly ever cook.

"Feels solid enough to me."

I roll her, my body above her, pin her wrist next to her head. She's smaller than me, bird-boned and delicate. We met in a coffee shop; she had a laptop, I had a headache. Maybe it was a recipe for disaster, but, three months later, that hasn't occurred to either of us. Not wholly, anyway.

She laughs. I feel it more than hear it, her tits pressed against mine.

"That isn't what I mean, asshole."

I know that isn't what she means.

"So tell me."

I like to watch her talk. In the middle of the night, her eyes are bruised with make-up and her lips are thinner, coloured less, but making interesting shapes. She tells stories, half propped up on white cotton covered cushions, this girl that I have met. 

Who is she? Who am I? You really want know? 

How about my girl the rock-star, New York city, strumming her guitar on small dark stages, or is that too much of a cliché? Okay, so she sat on levies in the Deep South, the wet South, swinging her feet and playing the harmonica, and that was where I found her. 

No? 

How about a wide rumpled bed, her and me, and no new world but us? How about her telling me about America, and the myth? She tells me about all of these people who came looking for a new life, and all of these people who were so let down. American dream, she says.  American dream, my ass.

I tell her that I had wanted to take a boat to America, to follow the Mayflower and the Santa Maria and the Titanic across the Atlantic. Nobody ever told me that syphilis came back over with Columbus. It's much more poetic if you think of the New World as a one way street.

I wasn't looking for a miracle, I tell her. I just wanted something new. That's all I was looking for.  
I was looking for you.

"Yeah, but somewhere there's a girl with wheat-blond hair who left her fucking peat fire behind because she thought she'd have more luck finding a husband in the fucking promised land. Fuck husbands."

But my hair is dark, and I don't want to fuck husbands, mine or anybody else's. That's kind of the point.

*

Every morning I wake up and, for a split second, I can't remember where I am and I can't remember who we are. The last thing I remember, I was going to school in England with my pleated skirt and my leaking shoes and suddenly here I am, cuddled together with this dark skinned girl in a bed over a coffee shop and outside was Yonge Street and two hours south if you hopped in a plane, Manhattan island. 

I never thought I'd be this close. Christ knows where I left my history books.

Or maybe I've been here before, padding through the forest, gun in hand, head nodding beneath the weight of my wet hat. Perhaps the trees were taller than I had ever seen in the land where I was born. The soft, damp loam clinging to the soles of my boots and my footprints, like it could keep me in one place and, in one place, safe. Words for what I was to this virgin country: discoverer, explorer, conquistador. God. My hands, large and rough. I came here with my desire, and my weapon that belched fire, but only briefly, just long enough to set foot here before I fell to the damp soil, kept in one place and safe as I'd ever be. Achilles had his bum heel, but Troy's a long, long way from here. He had his heel, and we had the soft, unguarded place between helmet and breastplate. Maybe I've been here before, shot through the neck with long arrows of the Iroquois and here we are, and we're still finding bones.

I can count her ribs with my fingertips. It makes it easier and harder, loving someone who finds themselves that close to the surface. At night, I fit myself against her, close as I dare, my chest against her back. America is a myth, she tells me, and I can never think of what I want to say to that until later.

*

America is a myth, she says and rolls towards me, and I cover her mouth with my fingers. 

_You were the only new world that I ever needed_ , I tell her, _and who cares how many people where here before me_. You are new enough for me. You opened your arms to me, and my ship, the one that I had built to carry me away from other lands where I had taken wounds from which I may never heal, foundered between your thighs. You were my safe harbour. I spent so long looking, but, once found, you were easy to return to. I found my way back to you on the night that all the street-lights went dark. I came to bed sticky with the summer heat and the sort of terror-excitement that came from walking through the dark streets and knowing that, two hours away, New York was dark too and a few hours further south, there were no lights on in the swamps or maybe I was dreaming and none of that ever happened. Either way, there are no lost girls here. I knew where you were all along.

These are things that I want to say to her, but never do. I guess that I'm too scared of fucking everything up. I guess that the way that I learnt to speak English and the way that she speaks English are further apart that I thought. Sex can be a language; a cobbled together pidgin tongue. You change things constantly to make yourself understand. You do a lot of talking with your hands.

I want to tell her why I came here, why I came to her so that, when the time to leave comes, it'll be easier to explain why. I’m going to fuck it up, I know I am, but I want to do it on my own terms and in my own time.

*

Once she's done with speeches for the night, I make up maps in my head. An atlas is a collection of maps, unless it's an atlas of anatomy. When I close my eyes, I can picture this city as the world's heart, slightly off-centre, and, tucked into the corner of a tattered ventricle, there's us, in our wide and rumpled bed. I'd like to pretend that I did something simple and poetic, stabbed my finger on a map and found Toronto and this American girl, 79° west of the place where I was born. Amerigo Vespucci mapped the world by watching the moon dance with the planets, and he came to this fourth continent and he named her like a daughter, like his first born child.

Listen: I had wanted to take a boat to New York City, but I found out that nobody really does that anymore. No explorers, and definitely no room for stowaways like me. So I took a plane to Toronto. It was the ticket that I could afford and it started my moving west west west. Moving isn't enough, not moving just for the sake of moving, but it's a start. Lovely as she is, she isn't moving, and I have decided that moving is what I need. I came here because I had a dream and, in that dream, I met a woman called America.

Here is the map that I have been drawing in my head:

From here, from this exact point, it's two hours by plane or twelve hours by train or nine hours in a car to Manhattan island. New York, New York and I could stay there until I started to feel that it might eat me whole. 

_America is a myth_ , she says, and I believe her, but only because of that one word can't possible cover all of it. America is an atlas, all on its own. Whether you think of it as anatomy or maps doesn't matter.

From Manhattan, I'll go west. Sea to shining sea they sing, but for a long time, I'll just have the dark Atlantic to my back and the Pacific as a promise and that will be okay. I can live with that. There will be too much to see to ever have time to be afraid. I'll leave behind that little green country where I was born, 0°, right at the beginning, and I'll traipse through redwood forests, under canyons and over mountains. When I was a kid, I watched cowboy movies with my brother and it amazed me that that great, dusty country could exist in the same geographical place as the snow capped mountains and the great lakes. That a place could be so flat and yet so tall at the same time.

_The west never existed_ , she tells me. _John Wayne is a big fat myth_

When I leave her, it'll be because she never let me believe in as many things as I wanted to. There are all of these things, all of these places, and I want to see them all. I'll follow the railroad west and when that runs out I'll pick up the tracks that the covered wagons left. I'll trail them through mountains and rivers, past the cities and the flat, featureless places. I'll cast bones in the desert to find out my future and I'll marvel at the sheer width of the sky. And all the while, ahead of me, always ahead, the promise of a shining sea. Pacific, Pacific, object of my very specific longing. Pacific, taken from the Spanish for calm, a wide, calm sea. That word makes me think of a beautiful woman with inky eyes, rings on her fingers and bells on her heels that chime when she dances and stamps her feet. Pacific, Pacific, bearing no grudges, remembering nothing, waiting only for me. West, wearing sea-shells in her hair. West, lying bare-breasted in the light cast by a driftwood fire. West, the true love of my life.

*

I'm sorry, baby. Right now, I love you but there will always be other girls, every one of them as young and as beautiful as you but some of them more willing to believe.  
And her. Always her.

West, west, west, west, west.

*

I lie in bed and I can count her ribs with my fingers. The average human skeleton has twenty-four ribs, but she only has twenty three. I wonder who she gave that rib to, or who took it, and where they put it. When I met her, she was drinking coffee with some other girl. That part is always the same, but sometimes the details change. I'd had a headache for the whole of the three days that I had spent in Toronto so far, or I'd been there a week and I felt fine. Her dress was sky blue or polka-dotted. My hair was longer or shorter than it is now. I don't even remember the other girl's face.

I wonder if it makes me wicked, how easy it was, or if just stands as proof that I was wicked all along? I asked her what she was writing. Sex, she said and closed her laptop with a click. I was carrying a plastic bag stuffed full of second-hand maps. I think that I said something ridiculous, some line about helping her with a draft sometime. How that led to me in this bed for three months, I have no idea. Maybe God loves me. Maybe I was due a sighting of the shore.

I was always a wicked girl. I'm the girl who left home without looking back. In the old days with the wooden ships, it took months to cross the Atlantic. You drank soft green water and prayed to the stars. Everything took longer than it does now. Getting from one side of America to the other was an endeavour involving a sea voyage and a leap of faith; you had to take the long way around to finally come to her side, West, her eyes painted like a promise. If I want to get there, all I have to do is get up one morning and get into my car and start driving and keep going. It's not a question of 'when' but 'if'.

It's something that I'm building up to.

*

Sometimes, when we fuck, I feel rough and crazy. I leave bruises and suck up kiss-marks. Sometimes, I wonder if she gave that twenty-fourth rib to the girl who came before me for safe-keeping. I've got images of bones engraved with FORGET ME NOT. This far north, sailors made scrimshaw out of whale's bones. Those things sell for thousands but my girl is slick and slender and all that I want to know is who she gave that bone to. Who’s she going back to once I'm a few degrees gone? It's not about fucking her up when I leave kissed up constellations of bruises across her belly and things. It's FORGET ME NOT and FORGIVE ME ONCE I'M GONE.

I know that it's not really any concern of mine. Which doesn't stop me being concerned. 

*

In the window above our heads the sun is rising, making the neon out on Yonge obsolete for the few minutes before anyone remembers to turn it off. Morning arrives but, on Greenwich meantime it's already been light for hours. It'll be dark hours before the neon comes back on again.

Here it is, baby: if America is a myth then it's one that everyone, the whole rest of the world needs to believe in. Sea to shining sea, the song goes. On a satellite photograph of the earth, the seas are dark but America bleeds light, its streets and freeways a vast nervous system, the dark places pockets of lymph and plasma. The cities look like human hearts, complicated but beautiful, many chambered. America feels too much to only have one.

West’s heart beats rapid like a Mariachi band, like dancing, like heels on wooden floors and the way my own pulse quickened or will quicken, the first time I set eyes on her. It's been happening for centuries and it's still happening now. People set out into the back looking for a place where the lights don't go out, looking for her cloaked in grass green and Pacific blue, wearing the street lights in her hair like diamonds. I was born in the dark, and so I was born hungrier than you. I was born already longing. It's easy for you to discount all of it, everything that I want to believe in, as a myth because you were born here. You can never come here for the first time and so you have to look other places to find your new bright world. It's no secret why it was an American man who was the first to set foot on the moon's white dust.

Think about it. 

I stretch and yawn and think about calling home. Maybe I've been the selfish child for long enough. Twenty-four years old, the time long past for putting away childish things. I wish I was ashamed of what my want had turned me into. 

I just wanted to see the place where I knew that love resides.

*

Hey, Mom. It's me. Remember me? Please remember me. I don't think I'll be gone forever. I'll need something to come back to. This is just to tell you that I'm not dead. This is just to tell you that I'm safer here than I want to be. I'll write if I remember. I love you. This is something that I had to do. Please forgive me and remember that the world is round. I won't be able to help but come back eventually if I just keep heading west. Still not sure when I'll leave for America. Maybe when the rain stops. I love you. 

Bye, Mom. I'm going back to bed now.

*

I've written it down on a notepad beside the bed. Next stop is 74° west, which is five degrees back the way I came, but that's okay. From New York City, it's a straight line, through mountain and desert and city and plain, along railtrack and freeway, and on and on down to the sea where she’ll be waiting. I’ll follow footprints in the sand, heavier at the heels, and I’ll find her sitting there, tan skin, dark hair, blue eyes. Something like that. She’ll kiss the palms of my hands and my feet will dig into the sand and tomorrow the sand will be warm and clean and unbroken….

I go back to bed and she isn't awake yet. She probably won't be awake for hours. I slip back in beside her and it's like I never left. One day, she'll wake up and I'll already be gone, but not this morning. Maybe when the rain stops.And I’ll believe it. I really will.

Maybe tomorrow. Or the day after that.


End file.
